Michael is a highly experienced freelance consultant with lots of experience of architecting and delivering integration projects which leverage the Microsoft technology stack. He has deep, practical knowledge of delivering complex solutions with BizTalk, Microsoft .NET, Microsoft Azure and associated technologies. Michael has also been a technical lead on 25+ projects which have leveraged Microsoft's cloud platform.
Michael is heavily involved in the community activities around Microsoft technologies through the Microsoft MVP and Advisor/Insider programmes and also speaks at user groups on a regular basis. Michael is also an author for Pluralsight having produced a very popular courses on .net and RabbitMQ.
Michael is also the creator of the BizTalk Maturity Assessment and initiative to help companies to measure the maturity of how they work with BizTalk and compare how they do BizTalk against recognized good practices. For more info refer to http://biztalkmaturity.com
I have been involved in the following Microsoft Programmes:
- Microsoft Integration MVP 2012 - Present
- Microsoft BizTalk MVP 2008 - 2012
- Microsoft Connected Technologies Advisors
- Microsoft Business Platform Advisors
- Microsoft Windows Azure Advisors
- Microsoft Azure Insiders

Probem When you are in an orchestration there and you want to create a new instance of a message but not by mapping it from an existing message there are a number of ways this can be achieved. Basically you use a message assignment shape inside of a message construction shape. There is another post which is not bad which explains a number of different ways this can be done. Although they all pretty much do the job I had some concerns about these and tried to come up with an alternative which I preferred. ......

BizUnit is a unit testing framework for BizTalk. This post will demonstrate how to test any schema you create using BizUnit to help you do this. Problem So the problem is that you have a schema which may change over time and you want to ensure it will always validate messages as you expect. In BizTalk you have a context menu which allows you to validate this schema and also validate instances of messages against the schema. The problem however is you want to do this as part of your unit tests so ......

Following on from my previous blog this will discuss the same topic in the context of the WSE 2 adapter. Problem Again i wanted to be regenerating the web services published by the WSE 2 adapter as part of my automated build. I wanted to use the same technique where possible, i.e manually publish the first time or when ever there was a significant change. I would then include the description file for the web services in my solution and then regenerate them using the custom msbuild task. My aim was ......

I have been doing a little work with msbuild and BizTalk. I want to regenerate the web services that are published from my orchestrations and schemas as part of my automated build process. This post will describe my experience for the Soap Adapter, I will also probably write about the WSE2 and maybe WSE3 adapter also. Problem We want a process for publishing web services from BizTalk that is simple and also will support our automated build process. Within our automated build we wanted to regenerate ......